Re-populating form page options after validation failure

[Michael Harrison <go...@alumni.princeton.edu>]

My problem bears some resemblance to one dicussed here in January, when 
Brandon Goodin posted about collection population when using the 
validator. (I read it in the archive).

Following Rick Reumann's Struts tutorials 
(http://www.reumann.net/do/struts/main), I have built a three-step 
registration process with Struts. In the forms that make up steps two 
and three, there are several selects and checkbox groups in which the 
values and labels are dynamically-generated, as in Reumann's tutorial. I 
have followed his design by coding SetUpFooForm Actions for steps two 
and three: these generate the values and labels and stick them as bean 
collections in the request scope for the form JSP to use. Then, upon 
form submission, a FooAction Action handles the submission, and the next 
SetUpFooForm Action is executed. So far so good.

However, now that I've added the Validator, I have a problem when step 
two fails validation: I can't point the failure forward to the JSP, 
since there are no values in the request for the form. I tried <forward 
name="failure" path="/SetUpFooForm.do" />  to get the setup action to 
run again and set up the necessary collections in the request. This, 
however, didn't seem to change anything: I still get errors from my 
Servlet container telling me it can't find the bean collections. In 
facct, from monitoring catalina.out, it doesn't even look like 
SetUpFooForm is running when the form validation fails. Is it illegal to 
point the failure forward to a setup class?

I suppose I could put the collections in the session, as some folks 
suggested to Brandon, but I'd much rather keep the system's memory free: 
there are a dozen collections, and they might be present for some time 
as the users complete the registration. Shouldn't my solution work?

Thanks,

Michael Harrison


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